January 1 movie: The Clock. This was a sweet, simple movie about Judy Garland and Robert Walker falling in love while he's on a two day leave before being shipped out for WWII. This movie wasn't a watershed event in the art filmmaking or anything, but I enjoyed it & was glad I watched it.
It was a perfect role for Robert Walker: an awkward, vulnerable kid. Judy Garland was a great costar for him. The best thing about the movie was the vivid picture of 1940s New York. I read online that the entire movie was filmed at the MGM studios in LA, which shocked me. I thought most if not all of the movie was filmed on location. The scenes in places I had been, like outside the Met and in Penn Station, looked totally real.
I caught the mid-section of The Clock twice during my childhood or teenhood, and never knew what it was. Many thanks.
I think it's almost a prerequisite for movies that give a vivid picture of a city not to actually be filmed there. New York is a major character in Down With Love, the Ewan Macgregor/Renee Zellweger homage to Doris Day/Rock Hudson films, but it turns out it's all CGI. And over here there are big posters encouraging Brits to vacation in the US -- "You've seen the movie, now visit the set". One of them is a panorama of New York from the top of the Empire State, taken from King Kong. As a friend of mine put it: "This year, I'll be taking my holiday in a computer generated reproduction of 1930s New York, created in New Zealand."